Rae Baymiller: On the Roads Again

The 67-year-old insists she is just getting started

Opportunities are not often presented at opportune times. They fall out of the sky, hit you on the head and beg to be given consideration. Unfortunately, when life doesn’t stick to the blueprints, we tend to forgo the chance to do great things thanks to intimidation and inconvenience. The timing just isn’t right.

Sixty-seven-year-old Rae Baymiller is not one of those people. She stands ready to seize the moment, at any moment. That’s how she became a champion harrier long after most people hang up their shoes. Having discovered a talent for running at 49 years of age, and subsequently shattering countless world and American age-group records, she proves that age is simply a state of mind.

Building a Foundation Perhaps Baymiller’s athletic career would have followed a more predictable track had she been born in the 1980s or later. She came into the world in 1943, though, 29 years before the passage of Title IX and 41 years before the first women’s Olympic marathon.

While she didn’t have the same organized athletic opportunities girls have today, she made the most of the era into which she was born. Tireless in her pursuit of activity, she spent much of her childhood in the great outdoors in her hometown of Albert Lea, Minn. Whether it was tobogganing a few miles outside of town on her grandparent’s farmland, swimming in the local lakes, cross-country skiing down the streets of her small community, or climbing trees, she could outlast all of her peers.

“I just had so much energy and I had to get rid of it somehow,” she says. “That has continued to be a strength for me as I have moved through life and it has definitely helped me in running.”

Her earliest memories of running were out on the elementary school playground. Regularly chased by two boys in her class, she earned the nickname “Legs.” “They would laugh and giggle and chase me, but they could never catch me. I always had the upper hand,” she laughs. “Maybe that was the beginning of my running.”